Though the new Timeline-style profile will be rolling out over the next few weeks, the beta is available today for developers. As for the new media integration, that’s available as of today for all users. If you checked out Facebook yesterday, a day in which the site saw half a billion users, you probably noticed a little news ticker in the upper right-hand corner and a new layout of your news feed. If you were annoyed with the new Ticker, today’s news might change your mind.

Zuckerberg said in his keynote that Ticker was created to be a lightweight stream of everything going on around you. Not all of the activity that goes through your Ticker will be shown in your News Feed. After all, seeing every little thing go through your News Feed that every 500 of your friends are posting can get a little annoying. Instead, you can watch in the Ticker as your friends activities happen in real-time. The News Feed is now more specific posts that Facebook thinks you’ll be more interested in.

Zuckerberg explained in today’s keynote that you can now listen to music, read news, and watch TV and movies right through Facebook. For some of the content, you can simply hover over your friends’ post that shows up in your news Ticker and instantly have access to that content. For example, if you see that a friend of yours is listening to REM via Spotify, you can simply click on their post and be instantly connected to the song they’re listening to and listen along with them. Then, you can open up your chat and talk with your friend about how sad you are that REM finally broke up.

Once the Timeline feature is integrated, you’ll be able to click on your friends’ “movie” filter to see all the movies they’ve been watching. If you see something you like, you can just click on it and watch it straight through Facebook. As shown in the photo above, you can also get an idea of what your friends have been listening to by visiting the music part of their Timelines. The nice thing about the media integration is that you’re not physically posting the song you’re listening to on Spotify to Facebook. Although we’re sure that’s still an option via each individual app’s settings, the apps are interconnected with Facebook so that if you’re listening to a song on Spotify, you don’t have to say you’re listening to it, it just appears on Facebook. Zuckerberg calls this “real-time serendipity.”

There are tons of partners so far that will help Facebook integrate different types of music, such as Spotify, MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody, Turntable.fm, VEVO, Slacker, Songza, TuneIn, iheartradio, Deezer, Earbits, Jelli, mixcloud, and more. For video, Facebook will integrate content from Hulu, Blockbuster, IMDB, Dailymotion, Flixter, and, of course, Netflix.

Speak Your Mind

lonegunmen

Maybe I just like my privacy, but do lots of people really like having others “all up in their business” all the time? If I’m listening to music, I could care less about letting others know, and I sure as heck don’t want someone popping in with a chat during the song and wanting to talk about how the band broke up. Leave me alone and let me just listen to my music, etc, in peace.

http://www.facebook.com/marksthomas Mark Thomas

Then get of Facebook, after all it is a “social” networking site… sigh.